


Love In Every Color of the Rainbow

by Anonymous



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Not Polly Cooper friendly, Poor Cheryl, Twincest, Unhappy Ending, mentions of torture, small amount of child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 11:12:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12231669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Cheryl's never gone a day in her life without seeing color. It's not until after her brother dies that she finally understands why.





	Love In Every Color of the Rainbow

**Author's Note:**

> Not a hardcore Cheryl/Jason shipper, but I do like the idea of them being soulmates. Both platonically and romantically. Also I really don’t the Coopers, any of them.
> 
> In this Soulmate AU, you can’t see colors until you meet your soulmate. You see black and white after they die. And when they are about to die, you see their favorite color.

When Cheryl is six, she declares her favorite color to be yellow, and demands that all of her clothes be in only that color. 

When Cheryl is six, her mother tells her a story while she brushes her long red (It's red. Cheryl can tell.) hair about how little girls and boys live their lives in black and white up until they meet their Special Person. The person in their life that matters the most. Their soulmate. 

Cheryl giggles at her mommy's funny story because that's all it is. A bedtime story. A fairytale. After all, Cheryl's always been able to see color. She doesn't understand what it's like to have anything else.

Cheryl knows that if she can see in color, then everyone else can too.

\--------------------------

When Cheryl is eight, she and her brother play together with their toy cars and she notices that Jason always chooses the red one. She decides to put this "only see colors when meeting your soulmate" thing to the test. 

"Jason, what color is that car?" She asks.

Jason scrunches up his nose and gives her a weird look. He picks up the red car in his hand, a silent question, and she nods. 

"Red. Duh," he tells her, and goes back to making the blue car and red car smash into one another. Cheryl smiles, and confirms in her mind that the soulmate story was indeed just a fable.

Her brother can see color just like she can, so that means it can't be true, right? 

Right. 

\--------------------------

When Cheryl is twelve, she realizes how good her favorite color looks on Jason. She tells him so in the garden that afternoon, and says that he should always wear something yellow from now on. 

Jason smirks at her, and plucks a red rose off one of their mother's rose bushes and carefully puts it behind his sister's ear. 

"Only if you always wear red," he responds. She smiles and nods, and they pinky swear on it.

From that day on, Jason always wears something yellow. A tie, a vest, a pair of shoes, whatever it is he always manages for something on him to be yellow. In return, Cheryl coats her lips in blood red lipstick every morning. 

Jason can't help but stare. 

\--------------------------

When Cheryl is thirteen, she starts holding hands with Jason in public, and people start to whisper as they walk by. She pretends not to hear them when they say that they’re weird and wrong and need to be put straight. 

When Cheryl is thirteen, her father tells her that she needs to stop being a baby and needs to move on from her brother being her only friend. He says that one day Jason won't be there, and she starts to cry because she doesn't understand why he would say something so terrible.

At dinner, she asks her dad what color the table cloth is and he slaps her across the face. She holds Jason's hand under the table for the rest of the meal and sneaks into his room that night so he can protect her from the dark. 

Out of all the colors that Cheryl can see, she likes black the least. 

\--------------------------

When Cheryl is fifteen, her friend Ginger starts crying in English class because all she can see is the color green. It’s on the teacher's dress and on the stems of the potted plants by the windows.

Her teacher carefully explains that when your soulmate is dying, all you can see is their favorite color. She says it's a sort of warning system set up for soulmates, so they can know if there's something wrong. 

Ginger comes to school two days later and says that her friend from California got in a car crash and died in the hospital from his injuries. Cheryl asks if Ginger can see colors again yet, but Ginger just says that the only colors she can see are black and white. 

Cheryl reckons that that must be a boring way to live. 

\--------------------------

When Cheryl is sixteen, she kisses Jason for the first time. 

They're in his room and she's helping him with his math homework, because he's never been good at that subject. He finally gets a question right without her chiming in to remind him of the next step, and they couldn't have been more overjoyed.

They're so happy that she gets caught up in the moment, and she leans over and pecks him on the lips for a split second before realizing what she's done and pulling back quickly. 

"I'm–I'm sorry. I'll just go," she whispers, so scared that her brother is going to yell at her and tell her that she's disgusting. 

She gets up off the bed, but Jason grabs her wrist before she can go too far. He pulls her back in and places his lips back onto hers as a way of saying that she did nothing wrong. 

It's then that Cheryl decides that her second favorite color is the blue of Jason's eyes.

\--------------------------

The next few months are the best months of Cheryl's life. She and Jason are closer than ever, and Cheryl never wants this to end.

She knows that what they do in their relationship is normal, couples kiss and hold hands all the time. It's just not normal for siblings. 

But neither she nor Jason mind all that much, hiding how they feel about each other from the rest of the world. People have got no business in their private lives anyway.

One night Jason tells Cheryl he loves her, and then kisses her on the forehead before they fall asleep together. Cheryl's happiness goes through the roof, and she falls asleep with a smile on her lips. 

She dreams about running away with Jason, some place where no one can find them and where they don't have to hide their love for each other. Somewhere sunny. With yellow flowers.

\--------------------------

Two weeks later Jason starts dating Polly Cooper, and Cheryl feels like her heart has been ripped into a million pieces. She sees green, and wonders if this is how Ginger felt back in seventh grade. But the green she sees is different from the dying soulmate kind. 

For the next three weeks, she doesn't put on any lipstick, but Jason doesn't notice that his sister is lacking her signature red. Cheryl learns what it feels like to hate someone, and that someone is Polly Cooper.

She doesn't understand why Jason would choose Polly without even telling her. Did he not love her, even though he had said he did on that night not so long ago? Had he been seduced by Polly's perfect family and perfect life, and decided that he rather be with a girl whom he doesn't have to love in secret? 

She's on her bed holding the rose that Jason gave her all those years ago. Its breath taking scarlet petals had died ages before, and the red has faded to a dull, shriveled purple. If she presses too hard the whole thing will collapse in her hands, and it kind of reminds her of her own situation. She too feels that if someone were to touch her then she would crumble. 

Then a realization comes to her. She feels so stupid for not thinking about it before, for doubting Jason. Of course he started dating Polly publicly to protect Cheryl! No one will suspect them if he's in another relationship. Jason would never pick someone as vanilla as Polly over Cheryl, the person he trusted the most. 

Cheryl walks into Jason's room then, and she finds him on his bed, reading a novel. He looks up at her and smiles, and she returns it easily. He scoots over on his bed so she can sit, and she happily settles down beside him and lays in his lap so he can card his fingers through her hair.

\--------------------------

Sophomore year ends, and June blinks by in a haze. Cheryl isn't able to be with Jason as often as she would've liked, but that's okay because she knows he's doing it for them. He's with Polly so they can be together one day.

Then Jason asks Cheryl to help him run away. He doesn't ask her to come with him. Cheryl agrees, because she loves her brother and would do anything for him. Especially when his face looks like that, so lost and hopeless. She knows that this town is weighing him down too. 

But she doesn't understand why he wouldn't take her with him. She doesn't ask though, too afraid to hear the answer. They plan to act on July 4th, they'll take a boat ride on the river and fake his death. The plan sounds just fine to her, until she hears the next part.

He's going to meet up with someone at a getaway car, with _Polly_. Cheryl feels several emotions all at once. Rage, because how dare Jason use her like this? Sorrow, because all this time she had thought that what she had with Jason was real. And envy, because she deserved Jason way more than that Cooper girl ever would. 

The night of July 3rd, Cheryl is alone in her bedroom, staring out her window at the twinkling stars. Her eye catches on a falling one, and without thinking she wishes that Polly never reaches the getaway car. 

\--------------------------

The next morning, Cheryl and Jason drive to Sweetwater River and go on a boat ride. When they reach the other side, Cheryl tightly grips her brother's hand so she won't cry.

She needs to touch him, to make sure he's there with her, if only for one last time. Jason says he'll call when he's somewhere safe, but Cheryl isn't as sure of his words as she once was. 

They embrace, and Cheryl never wants to leave this moment. She wants to go back to last night and wish again, this time wishing for the power to stop time so she can live here forever. With him.

But the moment shatters at the echoing sound of a gunshot. Jason all but runs away from her after that.

Cheryl wants to scream and cry and beg Jason not to go. Not to leave without her. She wants to tell him that he's all she has, and that when he's gone she'll have nothing left. 

But Cheryl doesn't do any of that. She just watches as he fades from her view, only turning back once to smile at his sister. His first love. As Jason moves on, Cheryl knows that she never will. 

\--------------------------

The tears she cries when Dilton finds her on the edge of the river are real. She's soaking wet and sans her other half, and she couldn't feel any emptier. 

If only _she_ had actually drowned in the river instead of having to stay behind and spin a story of how Jason was claimed by the current. She knows that no one would care about her either way. 

Once upon a time she might've said that Jason would care, he always cared. But she no longer knows if that's the truth. 

\--------------------------

Every night for a week, Cheryl is plagued by nightmares. It's always the same thing, too. A dim room, reeking of blood and mould, accompanied by the sound of weeping. 

Sometimes she hears Jason's voice. He usually speaks in whispers, sending out prayers and mumblings of her name. His lips are cracked and bleeding. Every breath he takes is strained and aching.

The only time that she gets awoken by her night terror is on July 10th. Her dream is worse than ever, then. The image is no clearer than it has been for nights in the past, but it's what she hears that nearly breaks her. 

_Screaming. That's all she can focus on, all she can recognize in this grey hell. Jason's tortured screeches of agony as whoever is with him bends his fingers one by one, so far back that they snap like twigs. Someone's sobbing, but she can't tell if it's her brother or herself._

She jolts back to consciousness with a stunted cry in her throat. She wants to go into the room next door and curl into Jason's side, but he isn't there. 

For the first time in days, Cheryl realizes that she has no idea where her brother is. 

\--------------------------

Cheryl doesn’t go back to sleep that night. She doesn’t remember anything that happened in the hours that she lied awake. She doesn’t recall when the moonlight outside turned into sunshine streaming through her curtains. 

She stays in her bed well into the morning, and her parents don’t come upstairs to check on her. She doesn’t expect them to. She misses breakfast, and then eventually lunch, but she barely notices. She’s unnaturally numb today. 

Evening comes around, and Cheryl knows that she can’t hide forever. She dresses and leaves her room, heading into the garden to take a long stroll through the roses. The scent of flowers always calms her down. 

The sun hasn’t set completely, and it bathes the garden in a luminous glow of orange and red. Cheryl runs her hands over the tops of the rose beds and sighs. If only such beauty could last. 

For a minute or two more, Cheryl’s at ease. But it never stays that way for long.

It happens so quickly that it sends her mind spinning in a sickening whirl. The colorful earth flashes before her eyes. The color red highlights her vision. Her nails, the roses, the sun kissed sky. It only lasts a brief second, and then it’s gone. 

_Everything_ is gone. 

Cheryl is violently thrown into a world of blandness. The green grass has faded to grey, the pink clouds above are white and barely discernible in the the equally white sky. The roses are no longer red. 

She knows what this means. She prays that she’s wrong. That this is just a blip in the universe, a black out, sort of. The colors will come back at any moment now. They have to.

They don’t. Cheryl stands in the garden for ten minutes, glaring at the roses that she knows for a fact are red even though they _don’t look red_. They stay that way, no matter how many times she rubs her eyes. 

Jason is dead. He’s gone, for real this time. The realization slams into her and tears through her chest like a power drill. She’s struck with a wave of nausea, and she collapses bonelessly. Her head throbs when it connects with the ground below her. 

Tears fall in endless rivulets down her face as she cries silently. She’s never felt so lost in her entire life. Jason is dead, and there’s not a damn thing that she can do about it. 

\--------------------------

Cheryl is seventeen when she spends her birthday alone. Her first birthday without her brother. There is no party, there are no gifts or well wishes.

There is only loneliness in the chilling September night. She sits at her vanity in her bedroom, staring into her reflection. She reaches her hands up, and buries her fingers in her curly hair. Through her eyes, her hair is dark grey. She knows that her eyes are wrong. 

A timid knock sounds from the other side of her door. 

“Come in,” Cheryl calls softly.

Polly pushes open the door and peeks her head inside. She looks worn out and sad, but Cheryl can’t bring herself to care much. 

“To what do I owe this honor, Polly?” Cheryl greets, her smile fake and voice empty. 

“I thought you could use some company,” Polly answers, entering the room and sitting on Cheryl’s mattress. Her hands glide nervously over her enlarged stomach. 

Cheryl eyes her up and down through the mirror. “You’re so sweet! I can see why Jason liked you.” She turns to face Polly, and feels a jolt of pride when she catches sight of the other girl’s quivering bottom lip.

 _Good._ Cheryl thinks. _You’re the reason Jason was killed in the first place. Without you, he’d still be here. With me._

“I’d say happy birthday, but I don’t think either of us would believe it,” Polly says, and Cheryl nods in agreement. 

Cheryl walks over to Polly and sits behind her on the bed. She takes Polly’s soft strands of hair (she remembers they’re blonde but now they look white) and starts to braid it. Polly’s shoulders slump under her touch. 

“Tell me, Polly,” she begins. “What was it like when you met JJ? Wasn’t the world beautiful?” 

“What do you mean?” Polly asks, trying to turn to face Cheryl. She stops moving when Cheryl’s hands tighten in her hair.

“I mean, how did it feel to see all those colors for the first time? Did it give you a headache, witnessing all the colors of the rainbow with no way of preparation? Did you cry when they seeped away again?” Cheryl’s voice is light, but her eyes are dark and menacing from what they both could see in the vanity mirror across the room. 

Polly shrinks into herself as Cheryl’s questions go on. “I don’t understand. My vision never changed colors. I’ve only ever seen in black and white,” She whispers.

Cheryl’s hands pause in their movement. “Really?” She breathes, but it’s not actually a question. “That’s interesting.” 

“Have _you_ ever seen color, Cheryl?” Polly inquires, eyes wide as she manages to look back at Cheryl. Her irises used to be blue, Cheryl recalls.

Silence falls between them for a long time. 

“No,” Cheryl finally speaks. “I haven’t.” 

They both know that she’s lying.

**Author's Note:**

> Clifford slapped Cheryl because he thought she was mocking him. He can’t see colors, because Penelope isn’t his soul mate. Can Penelope see colors? Good question.


End file.
